Willmott Dixon has revealed its financial highlights for the 12 months to 31 December 2021, and has generated a turnover of £1.1bn explains group chief executive, Rick Willmott
The company’s 2021 financial highlights include a turnover of £1.1bn, and an order pipeline of £1.4bn clearly identified for the next 18 months.
Willmott Dixon also revealed that it has been carbon neutral for the 9th year in succession, and has reduced absolute carbon emissions by 17% since 2020, and by 32% since baseline year of 2018.
Trading profit was strong despite challenges faced by UK economy and the construction industry
Willmott Dixon’s group chief executive Rick Willmott commented: “Our underlying trading and profit was strong across all of Willmott Dixon’s operating companies, despite macro-challenges that the UK economy and the construction industry continue to face.
“However, our progress has been distorted by the need to increase our cladding related provisions to £61 million in aggregate in line with accounting standards, while we pursue recovery from those organisations ultimately responsible for designs, fire safety advice and insurance protection.
“We are all beginning to decipher the retrospective impact of the new Building Safety Act at a time when many in our industry will be wondering how the widespread failure of the Government’s own regulatory and testing system has left building owners and their contractors facing uninsured and unquantifiable financial risks for residential properties certified as fully compliant with Building Regulations over the last thirty years.
He added: “It is a poorly conceived travesty of justice that shines a spotlight on popularist law making.
“While the Act has quite rightly found a solution to the problems of innocent occupiers of some dangerous buildings, it has done so by making a scapegoat of the whole industry and by throwing developers, contractors and their supply chains under the proverbial bus rather than accepting the fundamental role that successive Governments, their own regulators and agents have played in creating this mess.”
75% of turnover was procured via frameworks
Rick continued: “Despite these evident headwinds, our teams have done a tremendous job securing over 95 per cent of budgeted work already this year, and our £1.4bn order book provides a solid platform for the future. Last year, over 60 per cent of our work was on a repeat business basis, which is something that continues to grow as customers use a multitude of framework options to secure our teams to deliver their capital projects.
“It’s important that 75% of our turnover last year was work procured via frameworks, which remain a proven way to deliver excellent quality, value for money projects for customers.
“This framework presence was strengthened significantly by our re-appointment on the Scape, Department for Education, Homes England and Procurement Hub national frameworks, along with a place on the recently awarded ProCure23 framework.
“When you add our existing relationship with Pagabo and Crown Commercial Services, plus our place on regional frameworks such as Procure Partnerships, SCF and LHC, we can support our customers’ access to a wide range of procurement routes that enable projects to be ‘shovel ready’ as fast as possible to support post-Covid growth.”
Supporting Levelling Up across the region
Talking about regional Levelling Up, Rick added: “There is profound change happening in towns and cities across the country that our skill-sets can support and accelerate.
“We are seeing a new sense of ‘place’ being created that transitions away from retail-reliant urban centres by offering new alternatives that encourage inward investment, job creation and more footfall, especially by strengthening the night-time economy. This includes re-purposing property to provide better cultural and entertainment offering and diversifying the residential offer to create affordable housing for local people, which is supporting skills retention.”
